“There’s been 11 hardback books on me,” the serial killer John Wayne Gacy told a reporter on the eve of his execution in 1994. “Thirty-one paperbacks, two screenplays, one movie, one Off Broadway play, five songs and over 5,000 articles. We may consider the obsession with true crime a contemporary preoccupation — with Etsy shops selling enamel pins of Ted Bundy’s face and his Volkswagen, and crime conventions filling casino-size hotels with teenage girls in “Murderino” T-shirts. But these grisly stories, and our insatiable thirst for them, have been monetized for hundreds of years. Long before the self-styled Zodiac Killer mailed his letters to California newspapers, threatening killing sprees and bombings if his messages were not printed, there was an English prison chaplain named Henry Goodcole who bolstered his modest salary by selling stories about death and sin.

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